By Michelle Dickey

The U.S. government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released a study indicating that software errors cost the U.S. economy $59.5 billion yearly. These findings no doubt affect satellite organizations. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that satellite enterprises can remedy the problem of costly software errors and better achieve their homeland security initiatives by adopting enterprise change management (ECM).

What is ECM?

ECM is a discipline fostering high quality software development. It enables development teams at satellite organizations to produce complete software releases by properly managing the myriad of software changes that occur throughout the lifecycle.

ECM prevents unauthorized changes to software assets, thereby reducing the threat that a terrorist organization would be able to make unwanted changes to satellite applications. ECM achieves this by enabling development teams to execute–from a single point of control–all their tasks concurrently on multiple platforms via version, change, and process management.

Using ECM technology, satellite organizations can monitor the status of their software assets at any given point in time. This approach allows them to reach their homeland security goals by avoiding costly software crises.

How can satellite organizations discover whether they face a software quality problem? One way is to enlist the help of an ECM process consultation organization, which can provide an assessment of the satellite organization’s development environments.

To begin this task, the ECM process consultation vendor will often conduct an in-house survey and gather metrics (e.g. rate of defects fixed, number of function points achieved by staff per hour, number of bugs left in the system, and the time spent on rework).

Many development environments at satellite organizations will be initially reluctant to undergo such scrutiny. But, the results are well worth it. The ECM process consultation organization can recommend automating software quality processes, enabling the satellite organization to eliminate redundant tasks and reduce costs.

After undergoing an assessment of its internal software processes, the satellite organization will be ready to focus its efforts on determining which ECM technology will best suit its environments.

At this time, the satellite company can opt to continue its engagement with the ECM process consultation and to solicit help in making the proper recommendations for an ECM technology matching the organization’s unique environments. Or, the satellite company’s development teams can start their own evaluation of ECM technologies.

The evaluation process is likely to be time-consuming, given the number of ECM tools available. To learn more about the different capabilities of these technologies, the satellite organization’s development teams can conduct a search over the Internet, using these terminologies: enterprise change management, change management, software change management, and configuration management.

Satellite organizations that pick one ECM technology as their standard can avoid the problem of incompatible ECM tools in their environments and promote software re-use across their enterprises. Further, they can implement common quality-based processes across projects to eliminate the learning curve for their teams.

Conclusion

Satellite organizations that want to increase their software quality can benefit from adopting ECM. A recent Yankee Group report found that use of ECM help an organization realize an average reduction in application downtime of 28 percent, an improvement in time to market of 23 percent and a reduction in hard development costs of 18 percent. Using this approach, satellite organizations can be one step closer to achieving their homeland security goals at a reasonable cost.

Michelle Dickey heads federal programs at Serena Software Inc., a San Meteo, Calif.-based software and services company providing customers with ECM solutions. She can be reached at [email protected].